Music and More - Essays, 1975-1991

"Classical music today is in deep trouble." With these disturbing words, Samuel Lipman introduces us to his own testimony on the current condition of music-and of our culture itself. His bold essays passionately defend the best in this culture against what Lipman sees as its growing banalization and politicization. Lipman's expertise in music is unmistakable, but he writes with the general reader in mind-lucidly, nontechnically, arrestingly.

"Much of the time, Lipman is not merely right, but readably, incisively, alone-in-his-time right. . . . Lipman is required reading for all who fear, quite rightly, for the survival of concert music and the cultural values it represents." --Washington Post Book World

"Occasionally a critic will emerge who is aware that our civilization and its music are not two things but one, and that the preservation of musical taste is a task worthy of the greatest sacrifice. Such a critic is Samuel Lipman." --National Review

"Concert pianist, critic, festival director, publisher of The New Criterion, and sometime member of the National Council on the Arts, Lipman has emerged in the United States over the past decade as one of its most influential defenders of conservative high culture." --Times Literary Supplement